Neal Ascherson

This Charter88 Sovereignty lecture was given on 25 February 1994

When I was a boy, my parents bought me a second-hand edition of W.F. Skene's Celtic Scotland - all three volumes of it. That was soul food - a whole Victorian banquet of unfamiliar history and myth. But like the best cooks, Skene made his imaginative feast out of scanty ingredients: the miracles of saints, the genealogies of kings, the cryptic scraps of Irish and Scottish Gaelic chronicles. I recall, for instance, how Skene reconstructed a lost episode of Dark Age history out of a single Delphic sentence, which ran as follows: "He was not king, on Thursday, in Kintyre."

So was he king in Kintyre on Friday and Wednesday, or was he king that Thursday somewhere else - in Lorn or Cowal? Or was there some Black Thursday on which armed strangers broke through the dry stone walls of his fortress, set alight the heather thatch of his two-roomed palace, and brought to a violent end both his kingship and his life? I forget Skene's answer. But I will always remember that sentence, because it contains a truth about the nature of rulers and sovereignty. What matters in local government as in the government of nations is not the splendours of power so much as its limits: the times and places, the contexts and situations, in which I am not king here.

I believe that the British State, this multinational construction in which we live, is approaching a final crisis of power, a dramatic period in which the pent-up contradictions in the British system of authority will begin to explode. That is not simply because the British doctrine of sovereignty is wrong (although it is wrong). After all, we have managed to survive with a concept of political authority which was undemocratic and fallacious for almost three hundred years, and for two hundred years - since the Enlightenment and the promulgation of the Rights of Man - we have been watching the rest of Europe and the Americas abandon that concept and move on to a radically different world of constitutional thought more suited to modern citizenship. But we survived because, until recently, it seemed not to matter so much that Britain's idea of the State was archaic, because the wisdom and pragmatic tolerance of British governance prevented it doing too much damage.

That is no longer so. And there are three reasons why it is no longer so, and why we are approaching a crisis which is not any more about ideas alone, but about very concrete things: like who controls a police force, and who appoints a head teacher and decides a curriculum, or how a city borrows money.

The first of these reasons is simple: the people of these islands have grown up. They are better educated and far more independent-minded than their grandparents were. They no longer understand themselves as subjects, but have grown demanding, even touchy, about their individuality and choices.

The second reason is the approach to Europe. Britain, like a spaceship nearing another planet, is now entering the gravitational field of very different constitutional ideas and very different ways of doing things. As this pull increases with our deepening involvement in European Union (and the post-Maastricht doldrums are no more than a lull), components of our spaceship begin to fall away or cease to function in their traditional way. The fact is that the unreformed British State, in its theory and its practice, is not compatible with European norms. If the Euro-sceptics seize the controls and swerve off into outer space, we could go on as we are for a bit longer. But if the approach goes on, then our institutions will change radically, out of recognition. We are closing on the invisible point beyond which fudging policy to resemble European standards will no longer work. Britain requires the sort of change which only revolutions carried out in the old days.

This difference between Britain and her European 'partners' - the singularity of Britain - is, I hope, growing familiar to everyone here who thinks about politics. But for the sake of clarity, I ought to summarise it:-

For the last two centuries, most European states have had republican constitutions (with or without kings or queens). These written constitutions are based on the concept of popular sovereignty. This means that there is a supreme law, usually including a list of basic individual rights, which is above governments, parliaments, presidents and judges. In these systems, not only citizens but certain institutions have rights which are entrenched by the constitution. The most important of these is local government: regional, district or municipal.

Britain, or more accurately England, experienced in the 1640s the first modern European revolution. It ended with the 1689 settlement, which essentially did little more than take absolutism away from kings and confer it upon parliament. What that means today is that the House of Commons, which in turn really means the prime minister and his cabinet, exercise something close to the absolute sovereignty claimed by the Stuart kings. There is no supreme constitutional law above Parliament; there is nothing which the Commons cannot do or undo by a majority of one. This parliamentary sovereignty can be lent out but not shared. If it were shareable, it would not be absolute and therefore the British would not consider it to be sovereignty.

The consequences of this absurd dogma have often been tragic. This is why Gladstone was unable to make Ireland a federal state within the United Kingdom. We are still living with the consequences of that, and some thousands have died with them. In the 1970s, it meant that the proposed Scottish devolved parliament could have been abolished by Westminster on a whim at any moment (as Enoch Powell famously commented then, 'power devolved is power retained'). In the 1980s, this dogma allowed Mrs Thatcher and her lieutenants to cancel whole blocks of local democracy, including the elected government of London itself, for reasons of naked party-political advantage. In no other European country would that have been conceivable. If the Christian Democrat cabinet of Konrad Adenauer, for example, had abolished the Social Democrat Senate of Hamburg, there would have been an insurrection and Adenauer would have been impeached for state treason to the Grundgesetz - the constitution.

Authority in the British State, consequently, flows downwards from the ruler rather than upwards from the people. On that principle rest two practices poisonous to democracy. One is the doctrine of official secrecy: that the proceedings of the State are secret unless ministers choose to disclose them. The second poison is the miserable status of local government: that residue of power which the ruler does not wish to exercise directly and which is allowed to trickle down to be used, under close and capricious supervision, by local worthies judged harmless by their superiors.

I come now to the third reason for the approach of crisis. This is the sudden and radical change in the practice of British government during the last fifteen years. From moderating the impact of an authoritarian idea of State, government has moved to multiplying that impact. Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism have displayed a striking dialectic: less government means more government. The retreat of the State from the economy has been accompanied by a huge centralising surge in the powers of the State. Local government, never strong in Britain, has borne the brunt of this.

This process has taken place at several levels. At the national level, the Conservatives, who once sold themselves as the party of local initiative opposing the party of centralised socialism, turned sharply against all projects for Scottish and Welsh devolution. At the intermediate level, Mrs Thatcher's governments (as I have said) abolished the English Metropolitan Counties, including the GLC, because they formed enclaves of Labour Party power inaccessible to the prime minister's will. The imminent abolition of Strathclyde, though a post-Thatcher event, probably fits into the same category, and it is not absurd to suspect that the entire reorganisation of Scottish local government - in itself an inexplicable act - is a device for concealing the destruction of Lothian and Strathclyde within a wider programme. The third level is the reduction of British local government in general: the cumulative stripping of local government responsibilities in health, education, policing and the rest, and the suppression of financial and fiscal autonomy which that stripping required. Matters are approaching the point at which the election of local representatives must seem redundant. Councillors are elected on an increasingly false prospectus, for in reality they now control so little. Local government becomes an outstation of central power in which an official appointed in London distributes Treasury funds to unelected bodies approved by the governing party and supervises their accounts.

I am serious: that is where we are heading. This stripping and centralising has been going ahead for fifteen years, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Its consequences are clear to see. One, common to all Britain, is the proliferation of the quango: although local people continue to supervise local administration, their qualification to do so is no longer popular choice but reliability judged by standards of the ruling party. As Hugo Young wrote the other day, "on the Michael Howard reading ... local democracy has become inimical to sound local wisdom". He goes on to quote Baroness Denton, whom he calls, 'a key mistress of patronage', as saying: "I have never knowingly nominated a socialist".

Scotland has understood all this much longer than England. For the second consequence of the grand centralisation has been fifteen years of government by a party against which - and against whose policies - the Scots have massively and repeatedly voted. Because this lack of mandate is so glaring, Tory Secretaries of State have been (sometimes) more cautious about the political stuffing of quangos than Baroness Denton. But everyone knows that if the tasks now performed by quangos were turned over to a democratic parliament in Edinburgh, those tasks would be carried out in an entirely different way. To put it another way, the fact that government policy in Scotland would so evidently be rejected if the Scottish people controlled it makes Scotland the real one-party state.

Now it is time to look on the brighter side - the other side of the North Sea and the English Channel - and survey local government as it is understood in the European Union. This brings me straight to the subject of sovereignty. Is it a myth, as I have suggested in the lecture's title? Bryce called sovereignty, 'a dusty desert of abstractions', but in that desert there are three species of camel worth distinguishing.

The first is national sovereignty. It must be plain that the nineteenth-century paradigm of total national sovereignty is now a reality only in places like North Korea. In the European Union, above all, we are watching the slow but terminal decline of the nation-state, as its monopoly of decision leaks away in two directions: upwards to the supranational institutions of the Union and downwards to the regional level. The second camel is the British doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which I have already suggested to be obsolete and pernicious: a deservedly endangered species. The third beast, until now unknown in these islands, is the sovereignty of local government.

A French region or a German Land is not sovereign in the old-fashioned sense. But its existence and powers are entrenched in two ways. First, by a national constitution which specifies them and whose amendment cannot be undertaken without picking the state itself apart. Second, by the general principle known in Germany as kommunale Selbstverwaltung, or subsidiarity. This is the European principle that authority flows upwards from the grassroots, as opposed to the British principle that power trickles down from the apex of a pyramid. Subsidiarity lays down that nothing should be done at a higher level except that which the lower level cannot do for itself and delegates upwards.

Impudently, British governments have pretended to believe that subsidiarity means national sovereignty, that Brussels should always be subordinate to national governments. But of course it means popular, not national sovereignty: the deeply un-British idea that a state is appointed by its citizens. It means that the legitimacy of a state exists in several tiers - but most powerfully at the bottom. It means that underlying self-confidence, that solidity which is found when you enter the Hotel de Ville, or the city hall of Bologna, or the modern parliament of Baden-Wurttemburg at Stuttgart, or the portals of the Generalitat in Barcelona. It means that special kind of partnership between local authority with financial autonomy and local business which produces the key to European prosperity in the 1990s - the medium-sized enterprise.

But local and regional power in the rest of the European Union is not simply a tradition. It is a process, as we can see in hindsight. The Rome Treaties proceeded on the assumption that the nation state would remain the fundamental unit of the Community, and until around 1970, West Germany was the only member of the old EEC with a federal constitution. But look at what has taken place since then! In Belgium the triple structure of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels has developed into a quasi-federation. Spain, a new member, rapidly regionalised itself after the death of Franco and became another quasi-federation. Italy's regions have enormously extended their autonomy. Even France, in 1981, broke with the Jacobin centralising tradition to set up 22 regions with elected regional councils (which, if they cannot legislate, can at least plan regionally).

The fruits of this process are very rich, especially but not only at the European 'core'. It has led to direct collaboration between regional governments and the world of universities, research institutions, and other intellectual seed-beds of technology. The most famous example is the 'Four motors' project through which Baden-Wurttemburg, Catalonia, Rhone-Alpes, and Lombardy, linked up by fibre-optic cable, press ahead with their exchanges of data, research results, training, investment, and cultural exchange. The shots are called in Stuttgart, Barcelona, Grenoble, and Milan, not in Bonn, Madrid, Paris, or Rome. Wales has inserted itself into this process, and the Welsh Development Agency set up an out-station in Stuttgart. But last month the new Welsh Secretary, John Redwood, cracked down on the WDA, on its unofficial 'embassy' in Brussels, on its regional contacts and on its emphasis on Wales rather than on Welsh membership of the United Kingdom. The Union Jack, not the Red Dragon, must now be the logo of the WDA's promotional literature.

This is the voice of incorrigible English reaction. But it raises an important point. Redwood acted not just out of blind unionism, but also because he recognised a truth. The two apparently contrasting phenomena of increasing unity at the European surface and increasing diversity at the regional level are in fact parts of a single development: the weakening of the nation-state so dear to British Conservatism. That is why Maastricht not only designed fresh steps towards supranational unity, but also instituted the Council of the Regions.

We can formulate a law of politics here. When European Union advances, so does regional autonomy. Conversely, when the project of union falters, Europe of the Regions also begins to slow down. We can also understand that when Redwood slashes through the nerve of European regionalism in Wales, he is striking at European Union itself. The abolition of Strathclyde, even if it is mainly a party-political move, carries some of the same implications. To remove Strathclyde, the colossus of Scottish local government, and to introduce a single tier of all-purpose authorities paradoxically removes two of the arguments which Conservatives use against the call for a Scottish parliament: that the parliament would be dominated by Strathclyde Labour councillors, and that devolution would load a third tier onto the apparatus of Scotland's government. But we must remember that Strathclyde, when Charles Gray designed its 'foreign policy', turned out to be precisely the right size and weight to take a vigorous part in the development of Europe of the Regions. As such, it formed a deadly threat to the anti-European instincts of the Thatcher and Major administrations.

But talk of tiers of local government may be misleading. Tiers: a neat, hierarchical structure. My suspicion, however, is that in the next fifty years or so neatness and hierarchy will fade out of what we call 'local government'. Sovereignty will cease to be a one-way flow, going either downwards (as in Britain) or upwards (as in Germany). Instead, it will become a sort of all-permeating medium, like water in a swamp, in which clumps and floating islands of self-government will relate to one another in many different ways. The 21st century will be a period not only of fuzzy logic but of fuzzy democracy.

I think this is already visible in two directions. The first is the whole discussion of regionalism in Europe, which the establishment of the Council of the Regions brings into embarrassingly clear focus. The fact is that nobody can neatly define a region. It is a democratically-controlled unit of government interposed between a central government and the grass roots of democracy. But how democratic should it be, and does it have to have a central government above it, and how big should it be?

There are regions which are revived kingdoms and principalities from the past, like Bavaria or Catalonia. There are regions invented yesterday for administrative convenience, like North Rhine-Westphalia, scaffolded up by the planners of the British zone in Germany without asking for popular consent. There are big regions like Lombardy and little city-state regions like Bremen; regions which almost have the powers of a state and regions - like the English county councils - which have less power than a small town in Flanders. One day, I expect, there will be floating Euro-regions whose political - as opposed to cultural - allegiance will be to Brussels rather than to some national capital city. (Some people think that a status along those lines might end political conflict between the two cultural traditions in Northern Ireland.)

And this brings up the question of small states. The region of Lower Saxony could no doubt buy out the nation-state of Luxembourg or the Principality of Monaco many times over. There is an anomaly here, but it will become less painful as the whole vertical, tier-built distinction between small state and region begins to liquefy. In the same way, some small nationalities will choose to become nation-states rather than regions of some larger state. This is something which we should all understand and accept. In relation to the European Union, nation state sovereignty has become a highly relative term, and independence is no longer very independent even without the Community.

Slovakia - to take a recent example - broke away from the Czechs in part because the Slovaks did not wish to approach and enter the European Union on Czech terms. It was obvious to them that they would get a better deal for their own special interests, and be better represented under the present Brussels-Strasbourg rules, if they made this approach on their own. But this sort of independence - Slovakia in Europe, to coin a phrase - is probably transitory. When Slovakia has been admitted to the EU, it will eventually be hard to distinguish it from a Euro-region; as fuzziness settles over what is or isn't a superior level of government, and as the nation state's significance continues to leak away, the independence of Slovakia will be a matter of cultural confidence rather than of clear political status. I am, of course, also thinking of Scotland here. The Scottish case for re-entering the European Union on terms negotiated by Edinburgh rather than Westminster is a strong and sober case. And if I am right about the rapid effacing of the difference between region and small state, then there are no grounds to raise a moan about disruptive nationalism. Quite the contrary. It would be very ironic if the present European Union structure, which still reserves the decisive role for national governments, pushed Scotland into a transitional independence in order to become a self-governing Euro-region. But history is full of little ironies.

The second direction in which fuzziness is already mounting over the horizon is the area of cities and city-states. We have got Europe des regions. What about Europe des grandes villes? There is already an emergence of cities from nation states which, if it goes further, will set up all kinds of problems, and open all sorts of new opportunities, for the conventional patterns of local government.

History helps to make an important distinction here. There are city states and there are free cities. City states - micro-nations formed by a city and the territory around it - have a brilliant past, whether in classical Greece or in renaissance Italy. 'Free cities' are different. Medieval rulers would often invite outsiders to come and found new towns, usually ports, in order to acquire centres of industry, trade and wealth. They did not control the territory around them, which usually remained feudal while the new cities were exempted from feudal rules ('town air sets you free' was an old proverb). They were full of money-making foreigners, literate and numerate, of all origins and religions. When the Lord Mayor of Warsaw was a Scotsman, his aldermen or bailies were mostly Jews or Germans - not an ethnic Pole among them. But then came the modern nation state, in which unified kingdoms swallowed up their cities or turned them - a dubious privilege - into 'national capitals'.

Now history is beginning to reverse itself. The big cities are once again multi-ethnic; the places where immigrant communities settle and seek work. They are places where a new sort of identity is being painfully worked out. That is true of Bradford or Lyon, Munich or Amsterdam, and it is true in a tragic way about Sarajevo.

The case for a 'Europe of the cities' is the case for investing in success, liberating the energies of the most dynamic points in society by loosening the bonds of the big towns to the nation-states around them. But there are serious arguments the other way. Rich cities might leave the rest of society in the lurch, if they were autonomous, ganging up to share wealth among themselves or using their superiority of communications to attract new investment. If national governments lost their power to redistribute wealth between town and country, the country and perhaps democracy itself might wither. Secondly, while cities may have most of the wealth and jobs, they also have most of the problems and job-seekers: the two extremes. What city wants to carry the whole burden of housing the new poor, and integrating immigrants, without government assistance? The price of independence could be bankruptcy, especially if the taxable middle classes migrate to semi-rural suburbs outside the city's frontier.

Here is the essential difference today between city state and free city. A free city is an urban unit: it will try to keep its wealthy citizens, but to draw a boundary that dumps responsibility for the poor, expelled to peri-urban housing schemes, on semi-rural authorities outside. A city state, by contrast, is an extended territory containing a large city. It is centre and periphery combined, and there is no way in which it can escape its duties to all who work in the city or to those who are dependent upon it.

So what is the difference between such a city state and European region? The answer to that is the answer to how long is a piece of string. A city state is just one of the multiplicity of living forms which will go to make up what we now call local government, and what tomorrow we will simply call government. One such greater organism which is made up of such a multiplicity of forms, each with its own life but none precisely superior to any other, is called a sponge. And that is what the future Europe will be: a huge, shapeless, fuzzy sponge made up of democratic forms, porous to outsiders, slow to make up its mind, difficult to define, breathing the water of liberty in and out.

Where will sovereignty have gone? It will survive as the sovereign right to have no sovereign. In this Europe, reaching eventually from Kintyre to Crimea, nobody will be king on Thursday or on any other day of the week.

That is the European future. Britain is marching away from it.

It is time for a mutiny.